 This is Jeff Deist and you're listening to the Human Action Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to the Human Action Podcast. Happy 2021 to all of you. It's the first show of the year. We'll be doing it generally on Friday afternoons from here on out. As most of you know, this is one of the few podcasts which is not afraid to read books, to discuss books, and mostly in the area of dense economics, but also sometimes in related fields like history and philosophy and logic and politics. So we had a great 2020, went through some very serious books, had a lot of good back and forth with the audience, and we're really excited about a new year. So all that said, we're going to start off with a book that I mentioned in my last show with Tom Woods, The Ethics of Money Production by Guido Halsman, who many of you know is one of our senior fellows, who is originally from Germany but teaches and runs a PhD program at the University of Angers in France. And I thought there'd be nobody better to help me work through this book than a friend of mine, Stefan Lavera. Many of you know him from his Bitcoin podcast. He lives in Sydney, Australia, so he's joining us from a different time zone. And Stefan, I'm going to tell you this. I don't sort of live day to day in the Bitcoin community to put it mildly. And there's so much white noise. There's just so many people talking, so much crosstalk that to make my life easier, you and Safi and Amus are the two people that I really rely on to help me understand and to basically sift through everything out there. Yeah, well, thank you very much, Jeff. It's an honor. I'm a big fan of you and of the Mises Institute. So very excited to chat with you today about, truly, the ethics of money production. It is one of my favorite books. And I often talk about it on my podcast. I often recommend it to my listeners who are trying to learn a little bit more about what has government done to our money, just like the Murray Rothblood book. Well, and it's because I've heard you mention it that I thought of you for this show. Does that mean that this book has some purchase or some resonance in the Bitcoin community? Do you think it's reasonably well known out there? Because the Bitcoin community and the Austrian community have a lot of overlap, but they're not contiguous necessarily. Of course. Yeah. So I think to some limited extent, a lot of people coming into the Bitcoin world, because they listen to my show, I've been promoting Austrian economics to them. And so some of them, as they come down that Bitcoin rabbit hole, some of them also go down the Austrian rabbit hole. And so they typically DM me and ask me things. And, you know, I'm often telling them, oh, hey, you've got to look at the ethics of money production. Go and read this book. And once you read it, it really does set things in a new light for you. And so for me, I mean, my experience reading this book was just, it was just, it was a real page turner. I actually remember the night I was, I've read it for the first time, like my friend, Bittstein, Michael Goldstein had recommended it to me. And I was traveling for work at the time. And I was, you know, had finished work for the day and I was back in my hotel and I was reading this book online. And I remember literally just reading it in one night. And it was just a phenomenal experience. I really, really enjoyed it. Well, and Stefan mentions reading it online. You can find it for free at mises.org to read. Just type in the ethics of money production in the search bar. It's not super long. It's about 240, 250 pages. So it's a bit of a slim volume in hardcover. Came out in 2008. And one of the things that struck me reviewing the book again, Stefan was that in the introduction, he talks about how it's really an ontology of money. In other words, it's a book broadly about the actual metaphysical underlying nature of money itself. And I was struck that there's a little bit of an analogy to Safedin's Bitcoin standard book because even though the title is the Ethics of Money Production, a lot of the book is not directly about that. It's about the broader history of money, about banking practices, about fiduciary media, about fractional reserve, about historical gold standard. So it really is a great overall money book, even for a novice. Exactly right. And I think it, as you say, it just places so much of the context, whether that is from a legal perspective, an economic perspective, a historical perspective, and also in the Ethics of Money Production, some element of religious perspective as well, where there's some level of situating it amongst Christian and Catholic thought also. And yeah, just for me, it just really clarified so many things and stated them in a very clean and precise way. So you, as you read this book, you really start to understand a range of things and you might have heard them elsewhere, put them put in another way as I had also. But I think it was just the way that Dr. Holzman puts it in this book that to me was just so magical. It was such a great experience to read it and just have it all laid out so clearly. Like there are certain ideas, for example, that no fiat money had ever existed without kind of first being linked to natural and commodity money such as gold. And so it's kind of like a really nicely cleanly put way of trying to understand how money originates and then how it is essentially the process of it's getting co-opted by the government. Well, and the other thing is since there's so much history in here, Holzman's not the kind of person to shy away from acknowledging that there are moral and ethical components. And as a result, we need to bring in, let's say, the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, traditional Catholic intellectualism, and he's not scared of that stuff. I mean, some people would say, oh, that has no place in a book about money, but of course it does have a place in a book about money. And what strikes me is that I think if you went to the average Econ PhD out there, they would readily say that there is something, there's an element of justice to how money is distributed in society. But they'd rarely say that there's an element of justice to how it's produced. And that's, I think, one of the really big revelations of this book. Exactly. And I think that's one of the things that perhaps is difficult to communicate to somebody who's not in our world, let's say, of the Austrian world of thinking that there really is a justice component to this as well, that it really is about what is the right way that money should be created and whether it needs a central planner or whether it can be determined. The supply of that money can actually be determined on the market itself. And so that's a very challenging, I guess, question for people who are not already in the Austrian sphere. But I think when you read the book and you sort of take in that perspective, it really, yeah, it just really changes your perspective on things. Well, what's been interesting for me is sort of a bit of an outsider to observe in the Bitcoin Twitter sphere is how people talk about time production and people talk about saving and people talk about applying thrift in their own lives because obviously they're big believers in Bitcoin and so instead of buying that, you know, 35 bucks worth of sushi and cocktails tonight, they'd rather have a tiny bit more Bitcoin. And it strikes me that whether it's intentional or not, whether it's conscious or not, whether it's because of Austrian principles or not, that there's something about Bitcoin and a super hard currency which is hopefully gaining value over time that teaches the lessons of thrift, which is sort of the opposite of fiat. Exactly right. And this is a point that safety makes. I want to make this and a bunch of the other guys in the Bitcoin world who are into Austrian economics were talking about how society as Hans-Hermann Hopper says its capital accumulation is what sets off society and by enabling this process with savings, that is really what enables us to be so much more productive. And so I think this is something that has spilled over into the Bitcoin world and people will generally, they will genuinely be talking about time preference and why we should try to lower our time preference. And this is like a good thing for us and for our own behavior and to think more about our families and what we're going to leave behind after we're gone, which is also an expression of a lower time preference. Well, and of course in an inflationary environment where interest rates are low or even nominally negative and certainly negative in real terms compared to inflation, saving is for chumps. Exactly. Yeah, that is unfortunately the hard reality. And I think it's okay. So for me, I'm in my early to mid 30s and I remember even when I was young, there was a bit more of a culture of, hey, you save in the bank account and you get some interest. But nowadays you don't even really get any interest. Savings accounts in banks are just getting completely, you're just getting annihilated in there. And so now I think that is also what this whole Bitcoin movement is about. It's actually trying to bring back the idea of saving. It's making savings cool again. And we have to really set everything right again where the world has come into this perspective of putting the cart before the horse of consuming first. We have to now reorient ourselves and think more, okay, no, it's about savings, building our capital, using technology so that we can produce and then we can consume. That's actually the way it should be. Yes, it is the way it should be and it feels like we're so far from that. When I look at the way this book is structured at the beginning part of the book, the natural production of money, a question that struck me that I would ask you in particular is, is Bitcoin natural? Would it have arisen regardless of central bank depredations or is it sort of a reactionary force against fiat? I do think of it as a reactionary force. I think of it like all these prior attempts at money were tried and failed. Now, and in fairness, it's not that gold itself failed. It's more just like the folly was trusting the government. And so there were earlier attempts at money, whether they were in a crypto form or whether they were in a more just a business form, right? You know, Liberty Reserve, eGold and so on. And in the crypto world, it was things like hash cash, B money, bit gold, all of none of those worked. Basically, all of them got shut down for one reason or another. But Bitcoin has been around for now for 12 years and it continues to rise. And I see it as essentially it achieves what human institutions could not because I think part of it. And this is also coming back to the book as well. I think part of it, Dr. Hausmann talks about how some of the different forms of money in history, they relied to some level on the credibility of their issuer. And so that was where if you had coins that were minted by a certain maker, that that would help people have some level of assurance about, you know, okay, oh, I know it's this brand coin and it's, you know, one ounce or whatever the denomination is. And then talking about how it transitioned forward into, oh, okay, now we're going to have, you know, paper money, but it's like by this person in some sense, Bitcoin is like the durability, if you will. Like if we're thinking of the durability of money, I think Bitcoin achieves that in a certain way because we know that the issuer can't be corrupted. It's a program that we all run when we run our Bitcoin node and our Bitcoin software. So, yeah, but I think you're right that it doesn't evolve as like, you know, it's not like gold. It's not just like naturally existing. It had to be created and it has to be maintained. But I think taking some of those lessons allow us to understand that money doesn't necessarily have to be tangible. Well, the notion that is today, of course, completely lost. And by today, I mean in the era of unbridled central banking is that money should gain purchasing power over time. And this is considered anathema for a number of bizarre reasons. I guess chief amongst them is that expansionary monetary policy benefits governments. And so governments and central banks work together to make each other happy. But I want to direct your attention and listeners attention to page 65 of this book because in just a little four or five page section, subsection of the book, Guido Halsman gives an absolute masterclass on the benefits of deflation and takes a sword to, I believe, six different rationales for why deflation is a bad thing. And it struck me as something that we should put out maybe as a separate article or something. Just Halsman disabuses the deflation myth because it was just... I mean, that's where this book really shines because it's a short readable track. But man, oh man, do you get something out of those five pages? Yeah. So in the fighting deflation section, I actually was... So I was reviewing last night as well and there are six arguments here. One is this idea that deflation has negative repercussions on aggregate production and therefore on the standard of living. And then they also talk about how, oh, because of deflation, we're going to postpone our buying because everyone's speculating that's going to be lower. And he just absolutely just goes through and blasts away all of these different six justifications because he essentially firstly points out that deflation has no clear negative impact on aggregate production. And so it's not like we had lower growth rates under that kind of monetary order. And he even takes it to the extreme and says, okay, in the case where people are talking about delaying their production, even if you're a neurotic miser, you still have the constraint of the stomach. You still have to eat, right? We still have to live. And so even in that case, he's saying, look, hoarding is not necessarily... It's not per se a problem because there are all these other X, Y and Z downstream impacts of that if you will. And so as an example, to the extent that you and I hoard our money, it just raises everybody else's purchasing power because we're not buying anything with that money. We're giving up that, in some sense, we're relinquishing the ability to, or at least temporarily relinquishing the consumption that we could have had. And I think he also spells out some elements around servicing debt as well. So he's talking here a little bit about how you have to anticipate the inflation expectations. So that kind of is a theme in this book. But I think one really, really crucial point here that he also really drives home in this section is he's saying bank credit does not create resources, right? So the typical, like a typical argument we might hear from the mainstream is something like, oh, but we need lending so that businesses and entrepreneurs can go and get capital to run their business. But Dr. Holtzman here is pointing out that, no, no, hold on, that's not true. Well, that's not exactly right. Really, you can extend credit to somebody, but really all you're doing is you are channeling the existing resources into some other business than the one that would have already had it. And so I think that is a very, very kind of basic point, but it's so lost in today's mainstream commentary. And so that and that reflects when people say, oh, but if we didn't have fear money and fractional reserve banking and these cheap interest rates, then entrepreneurs would not be able to borrow to get the resources they need. And it's just, it's like, no, that's just fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on here. And of course, nobody can provide a definition of hoarding. It just means too much, right? There's never as a percentage or anything else. And of course, by hoarding what we're doing, what we should really say is maintaining larger cash balances than we otherwise would. But hoarding just means that we are voluntarily shrinking the money supply. And sure, if there's less, you know, if there's sort of less demand for money, then interest rates might fall and people who have borrowed money at 3% and now earning 1%, they may be in trouble. But as Halsman points out that, you know, that just changes who owns the resources. It doesn't provide any diminution in them. And so I thought that was just such a masterful little section of the book that everyone would benefit from. And he alludes to a point which Rothbard makes very succinctly in what his government done to our money, which is we don't care about the money supply per se, right? The total amount of money in society because as long as it's infinitely divisible, we can always readjust prices. So, you know, I'm struck by some criticisms of Bitcoin in the sense that the ultimate limit in the number of bitcoins minable at 21 million, somebody would say, well, that you're setting an artificial ceiling on the money supply. Right. And so it's the same answer essentially. Those 21 million bitcoins are divisible down to 100 million satoshis or sats for short. And with other technical ways of doing this, it could be subdivided even further. So essentially the price would just rise to adapt for these things. And so, yeah, certainly I think that is a point that Halsman really drives home here in terms of the ability to, you know, around how wide the supply of money per se doesn't matter. And I think it's also really another point is that he raises in deflation and liberty as well. So that's also another really nice short version articulation of many of these points also. You know, Bob Higgs uses the term regime uncertainty. But when we have these hiccups every 10 or 12 years, members central banks were supposed to smooth out the booms and busts while we just had one in 07 or 08. Now we're having one in 2020. It strikes me that regime uncertainty could apply to central banking too because when you have crazed fiscal and monetary policy, you know, wow, imagine being out there and trying to plan your business. Let's say you're a big multinational, you know, imagine trying to understand where interest rates are and whether you should borrow or invest or buy your own stock back or keep more cash or not have any cash. Or if you're Michael Saylor even exchange cash for Bitcoin on your balance sheet. I mean, with all of these tremendous sort of, you know, they talk about volatility. I mean, central banks to me are exceedingly volatile. Yeah, of course. And I think that this comes into this whole question around monetary stability as well. So, and I think Gitter-Hosman explains this in the book as well. He talks about two forms of it. He talks one about stability of physical integrity and then stability of purchasing power. And the stability of the purchasing power part is something that we can never really have because really the world is always changing. There's always some errors being made somewhere or some changing condition and people's desire to hold cash will raise, you know, rise that will go up or down. But in terms of us knowing what the final supply of this thing is, well, at least in a Bitcoin sense, we do know that. And in a gold sense, we know that there are certain natural checks, if you will, on the creation of new gold, the mining of gold to produce it into gold coins and so on that we could use theoretically if we were to live under a gold standard. And so I think that is a real benefit there for those people who are using market chosen money such as gold or Bitcoin, that they are not as susceptible or vulnerable to the vagaries of what's going on with central banking. Certainly, I think central banks have put us into a very weird situation where people are now, as Michael Saylor would put it, we're sitting on a melting ice cube and now we all have to think about what to do about that. And even in ethics of money production, there's discussion about how for many people when they want to save and especially towards the end of their life, they might need a financial advisor, they might need a tax planner and they might need to watch the financial markets. And even then, if they're unlucky, they might still end up with a lot of their life savings getting inflated or lost because of having been pushed into playing the financial markets. So that's a real shame. It is a shame, especially at a time in people's lives where they should be out of markets and just sort of living off of capital and interest. And one of the things that this book I think lays out equally well is the case against inflation. In other words, if deflation is not the boogeyman we thought it's actually a desirable state of affairs then it follows that inflation must be an undesirable state of affairs. And I like the way that Halsman separates between what he calls private inflation and fiat or state inflation. So talk about that a little bit. Oh, of course. Yes. So I guess if I had to maybe summarize into maybe I'm maybe I'm not as precisely stating it, but it's sort of like in a fully free market, there would be some level like a natural level of inflation that might occur as people go and mine new gold. And there would be a normal, almost like a countervailing balance factor where if too much of that gets mined, well then the return for going and mining new gold goes down as such that there would be a level over time of natural production. And I think historically, as people like safety pointed out, that level is something like one and a half to 2% inflation of gold per year hypothetically. But what happens in the fiat world, once the government co-ops the money and puts in its monetary interventions such as legal tender laws, central banking, the lender of last resort, you know, implicit and explicit bailout guarantees, all of these things that essentially cause what calls a race to the bottom that they essentially create this scenario for fiat inflation, which now we get a bit more technical and it's kind of how much of that is directly printed by the central bank versus how much of that is printed by the commercial banks, but in a central banking regime in a fundamental fraction reserve banking regime where this is permitted. And so historically, we find the inflation rate in that kind of scenario to be a lot higher. That's more like 7% or 8% or depending on what country, you know, you might be paying 15% or 20% in a kind of inflation hidden tax and that's fiat inflation. Well, and so one thing that commercial banks do within that central bank regime as you describe is they issue fiduciary media or what we would call unbacked money substitutes and the extent to which they do this depends on a lot of things. It depends on their capital constraints. It depends on the lending market. It depends on the credit worthiness and demand for credit borrowers and that sort of thing. But at the end of the day, we end up not only in our Byzantine banking system we have today, not only with a bunch of sort of first level fiduciary media, a bunch of unbacked money substitutes, many, many people making or holding paper claims to the same underlying reserves at a bank. But we have something even beyond that where a degree of money-ness, I guess we could call it, it becomes in a de facto way assigned to things even like U.S. Treasury debt or maybe certain Goldman Sachs bonds. I mean things that almost seem so liquid that they become money substitutes of a sort. And so when we start to think about the monetary base or M1 or M2 or what we used to call M3 before the Fed stopped tracking it. In fact, this sort of ticking time bomb out there in the form of claims to real money which cannot be satisfied might be far, far larger than we imagine. And we've had glimpses of this with collateralized debt obligations, tranches sliced up around housing for example in 2008. And today we have a word for the shadow banking. And so if you listen to people like Caitlyn Long, the real nuclear weapon out there might be all of this stuff that is awfully akin to money out there but which doesn't have any real money underlying it. Precisely. And I think it's what we have to look at is the overarching conditions under which we live under. It's that because of these initial conditions that the government has done because the government wants to control the money, right? Legal tender laws, blah, blah, blah. We live in this world of cheap debt. And I think the system evolved in that way or it kind of grew up in that way. And because of that, now we have these huge markets for debt and for bonds. And that obviously helps the government because the government relies on that for debt funding as opposed to fully tax funding everything. And then as you were saying, then we've got this whole weird, crazy scenario where there are like corporate treasurers out there who are looking out for these kinds of risks and thinking, well, maybe I'm better off. Even though I know I'm going to lose money, I'll hold some US treasuries because that is that for me is quite unquote safer than leaving it in these banks where the deposit guarantee only goes up to a certain level. So it's kind of a it's a confusing and very technical world with all these weird little nooks and crannies. And so what we historically thought of is, okay, it's just M zero and then it pyramids up and M one and M two. And it's like now it's more just like there's all this money out there and people like Jeffrey Snyder and Caitlyn Long and others are kind of helping point out that, well, maybe the Federal Reserve doesn't actually have the best picture of what's going on out there because there are people trading, if you will, a synthetic dollar around and about. And so I think all of this is, we've been put into this scenario, I think under a natural order of, you know, economics and money, we would, I think, tend towards a full reserve system where people would demand higher level assurances over their money whereas now, because we've been pushed into this fractional reserve system and part of that was government influence right it's legal tender laws it's forcing us to treat these inferior. As you said for do you share a media, these substitutes for money that they're not as though they were real US dollar. And so I think it that it we've been pushed into this system because of that and that's what we've that's now why we're seeing this kind of outgrowth of excesses of that system. Well, imagine that we have all this weaponized unbacked money out there. And imagine furthermore that we don't even know the number because some of it is sort of traded privately and it's not easily accessible, you know, in the Wall Street Journal or something to figure out where it all is. And so some of the estimates of total worldwide debt sovereign otherwise might in that sense be a skew because some of this money, some of these money substitutes are basically claims that look a lot like debt. So you put it all together and you say what if there was a big crash someday and the US dollar lost its status and what would things look like afterwards. You recently had a guest on your own show, an important guest, a famous guest, Niall Ferguson, and he laid out some monetary scenarios, one of which would be, you know, some sort of ugly hyperinflation and a few others. One that he didn't mention and Halsman alludes to some sort of international system potentially, you know, that would replace Bretton Woods or post Bretton Woods in his book here. But I'm sure you've heard of the idea of the IMF becoming the backstop to central banks. So just as central banks were originally designed, at least allegedly, to back up commercial banks, then there would be a central bank for central banks and in under the auspices of the IMF. And they would issue what are called SDR special drawing rights, which at least at the beginning and they exist already. But at least under some new regime would consist of a basket of currencies to make a bunch of countries sort of comfortable and willing to go along at first. Maybe it would contain the U.S. dollar and the Chinese Yuan and the Swiss franc and maybe it would contain a few commodities like gold and men's solely over time. These SDRs would sort of become their own money. They would take on money-ness characteristics without having necessary underlying value. And this is something people like Jim Rickards have talked about and you can say it's slightly conspiratorial or you can say, no, no, no, that's exactly what world leaders will rush to and clamor for. If there is some sort of currency breakdown. So I know off to the side, there's a bunch of people screaming right now saying Bitcoin fixes this. But apart from that, what do you think about the concept of internationalization of currencies? Because now we have sovereign countries issuing their own currencies, their own debt. And since everybody's got their own self-interest, you could see a really nasty global worldwide recession being used as justification. I'm going to say, no, no, no, we need one overarching monetary body. Right. I think if it was going to be that sort of system, yeah, I think this whole IMF SDR thing, maybe that's a possibility. I see it like a lot of central banks around the world now are experimenting and doing trials on this idea of central bank digital currencies. So potentially they try to make an SDR that is some kind of CBDC and they try to placate the different powers of the world, essentially based on their political or military might and say, OK, USA or OK, China, you get this much of the basket and to try to give them some level of power at the, give them a seat at the table and so on. I think maybe that's if anything, that's kind of like what happened with Facebook and Libra and how they sort of got really smacked down hard because they were essentially challenging the power, openly challenging the power of governments and their money. So I think potentially the CBDC kind of thing is an avenue that they try to go down. I think what we will see, though, and I think this very much reminds me of a point I read from Hunterman Hopper's article, how is fiat money possible? Because I think he takes it back to saying, well, hang on, why do we use money? We use the most saleable one. And if we were to use a basket of commodities, then the basket of commodities would not be saleable as the most saleable one inside that basket. So I see it like we're probably likely to just limp along for a little while on the US dollar for a while until the world chooses something better. But I think, of course, the governments around the world will try. I think they will try central bank digital currencies. I just see it like we're just going to kind of limp along for a while. And I don't know if it will be like a big, great crash. I just think it would just be like a Japanification of the world that we just kind of... Because I guess the way I see it is, and I'm pretty sure you would agree, is that many of the governments and central banks have painted themselves into a corner. They, under their own kind of frameworks, theoretically, they should be thinking, oh, we need to raise the rates, but governments are in massive, massive debt. They can't afford that kind of thing. So the best they can do is to try to just eek it out for as long as they can. And I think that's probably the reality for a lot of this is we might think, oh, look, this system is unsustainable. It's going down, but we don't know when it's going down and they can just kind of eek it out for as long as they can. Yes, I think that's probably a likely scenario that we all just become zombies like Japan and people would sort of get used to the idea that you don't earn interest on money. And we would sort of limp along and we'd have declining economic fortunes. And maybe all of that could just happen slowly over decades so that we don't scream too loudly. I hope that's not the case here. It's frightening. But what this book is about, I guess, on some level is that all of this makes us worse people. It makes us present oriented. It makes us gloomy about the future. It makes us not save and put away for future generations. And you don't even have to have a family. You just understand civilizationally, we're all standing on the shoulders of previous generations that helped create all the material wealth and abundance that those of us who are fortunate enough to live in places like Australia and the United States enjoy every day. And the idea that that material wealth will continue to organize itself around us, regardless of incentives, regardless of the quality of money, and that we can degrade our money without degrading ourselves societally, I think is just crazy. You're right. And I guess to put it simply, regress is possible. I think we have become so, what's the word, entitled, and we have become so as a society, right? We've become so entitled and we think everything is just going to be progress. There's always this kind of upwards arc of history and so on. I guess that's more of a progressive idea. But still, people just do not appreciate how fragile society can be and how things could break down if we don't appreciate the things that make our humanity great and our ability to trade and transact and to save across time and space and all of these things. And Dr. Holzman points out in the book that there's spiritual casualties of fiat inflation. And he points out that it changes the way people act. It makes people act in a more materialistic way. It means they are less able to perhaps care for their own families and societies. And to some extent, that makes them less of an independent man able to help their family and friends. And they become more dependent and they become more submissive. And they become more, you know, pliant and willing to do what the state and docile. And perhaps that is also part of the reason we have not seen as much of a pushback against all of this, you know, hysteria 19 government stuff is that people have had their financial self-reliance taken from them. Now they are more dependent on the being in the good graces of the people around them and they don't want to say anything bad in case they get fired or in case they, you know, lose their ability to feed their family. And so there really is this kind of spiritual and cultural consequence of inflation. And I think Giddo Holsman does a great job in this book trying to tease that out and explain that to people because I think to a person in the mainstream media, they may look at this and think, what do you mean like fear money can cause degenerate behavior? But it really can if you actually look through and trace through the implications of fear money. Well, we saw an example of that on this show just a few weeks ago when we covered Adam Ferguson's When Money Dies. And he talks about the period of hyperinflation of Weimar Germany, Weimar Germany and the, you know, the depredations that caused the privations that caused the rape, the prostitution, the, you know, the theft, the creating orphans. I mean, it was really something and we tend to view central bankers, Stefan, as these sort of dry technocratic guys who went to Wharton or something or Oxford. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we tend to think that they're just dialing knobs around and looking at spreadsheets all day and that they exist in an ethical vacuum. Exactly, exactly right. And so I think there really is a moral element to using and promoting sound money. Well, we'll finish with this, the conclusion, the final chapter of this book is just fantastic. And again, Halsman, who happens to be a devout Catholic, you know, he quotes John Paul II here with a really great definition of capitalism. And I just want to, I'm just going to read John Paul II's quote here because I think it's great. Because oftentimes even people in the libertarian sphere say, no, no, no, we shouldn't use the term capital. That's a slur. Marx created it. It implies the untoward accumulation of capital in the hands of a few people. Whereas, you know, Mises used that term to mean private ownership. He used that term to mean social cooperation and markets, that it was really the best system for well-being throughout society. So here's, here's John Paul II. He says, if by capitalism, it's meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business. I don't think we'd hear Francis say that, by the way. The market private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative. So I thought that was interesting. And then he goes on to give, you know, a sort of a dog eat dog version of capitalism. He says, that's not what I mean by capitalism. So, you know, it's just, it leads Halsman to say that in this regard, as we have shown, there's no fundamental disagreement between the views of the Austrians and the Catholic moral concerns. So, you know, I guess some people don't want to see that sort of thing in a book about money and economics. I understand that. But the flip side is that I think everything needs to be placed in the context. And you can't understand the history of where we, how we got here without understanding some of the religious and ethical components of, you know, the drove people's worldviews for centuries. Of course, yeah, I think so. And I think we, you know, we grew up in this society with these kinds of values. And this was the way we, this was the, yeah, this is the way it evolved. And I guess, you know, whether you're religious or not, I think you certainly will take a lot from this book. I think even on my reading of it, I really don't see, you know, if you're not a Catholic or not a Christian, that you would still not learn a great deal from reading this book. Well, we're going to leave it at that. Again, ladies and gentlemen, you can find this book at Mises.org just in the search bar type in the Ethics of Money production. It's available free there in PDF form. If you want to purchase it from the Mises.org store, use the code HAPOD for Human Action Podcast and get 10% off. Before we go, I want to thank our guests, the great Stefan Lavera for joining us. Stefan, just real quickly tell people how they can follow you, how they can find you on Twitter and find your podcast. Oh, of course, just look me up Stefan Lavera and my website is StefanLavera.com and thank you very much, Jeff. It's been an honor to chat with you. Same here. I wish you everything for the best in 2021 and I hope Sydney remains a great city to live in. Thank you, Jeff. And same to you. And find more content like this on Mises.org.